Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy

The poet and visual artist Mina Loy has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism—in Florence as Gertrude Stein's friend and Marinetti's lover; in New York as Marcel Duchamp's co-conspirator and Djuna Barnes's confidante; in Mexico with the greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan; in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke's riveting, authoritative biography, Becoming Modern, brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism—and one woman's important contribution to it.

BECOMING MODERN: The Life of Mina Loy

User Review - Kirkus

An impressively detailed but cold and disagreeable biography of the neglected modernist poet and visual artist Mina Loy. Born Mina Lowy into a half-Jewish, half-neurotic London household in 1882, the ...Read full review

Becoming modern: the life of Mina Loy

User Review - Not Available - Book Verdict

Burke (English, Univ. of California-Santa Cruz) has written a comprehensive biography of poet and visual artist Mina Loy. Burke sees Loy (1882-1966) as the prototypical New Woman of the 20th century ...Read full review